Oak Park housing agency must defend 
racial discrimination charge

By ERIC LINDEN

Charges that an Oak Park housing agency discriminated for racial reasons
against a black resident who sought financial assistance to rent an
apartment in the village were restored last week by the U.S. Appellate
Court in Chicago.

The appeals court on June 21 overturned a previous court decision and
let Jackie B. Allen have a trial on his charge that the Oak Park Housing
Authority denied him housing assistance because he is black and because
he was mistaken for a criminal by the housing agency and by the Oak Park
Police Department.

The Housing Authority, which manages Oak Park residential and commercial
properties with the goal of improving racial diversity in the village,
has denied the accusations and will have a chance to do so again when
the matters come back to a court of law.

"The case should not have been dismissed," the United States Court of
Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in part. The court also commented
that "Oak Park's explanations for its conduct raise ... issues of fact."

Allen who ultimately got the assistance for an apartment in Oak Park but
who has since moved from the village, says in his suit that in 1997 he
applied for a federal Section 8 grant to assist him in paying rent for
an Oak Park apartment. According to the rules of the federal program,
the Housing Authority had to rule on Allen's eligibility.

As part of that review, the agency, now based at 21 South Blvd.,
provided Allen's name, race, gender and social security number to the
Oak Park Police Department, which was to do a background check on Allen.
Section 8 applicants are not eligible for federal rental assistance if
they have been arrested on a drug-related or violent-crime charge in the
three years before applying for the grant and they must be free from
jail for at least five years if they have been convicted of a crime.

The police or other officials may have botched the background check on
Allen because they reported that Allen, who has no criminal record,
really was "Larry W. Hamilton," who had been convicted of "smuggling."
The court records maintain that both Allen and "Hamilton" are black men
but had different birth dates. Also according to court documents,
Allen's social security number was "one of several ... linked to" the
"Hamilton" identity. The Appellate Court said that "Based on this
information, the (Oak Park Housing) Authority assumed that Hamilton was
Allen and thus rejected (Allen's) application for housing assistance."

The troubles reportedly continued on another front. When Allen contacted
the Authority's Section 8 program director to inform her of the mistake,
she instructed him to get an attorney to prove his contention of
mistaken identity. Instead, Allen initially appealed the matter to the
Housing Authority's executive director.

The Housing Authority also refused to release details about "Hamilton's"
criminal record, which also could have helped Allen clear his name. The
Section 8 director said a police officer told her that releasing the
background check "would violate (Hamilton's) privacy rights if the (he
and Allen) were, indeed, different people."

By the time of Allen's hearing with the Housing Authority's executive
director, Allen had secured the legal help of Merilyn Brown, an attorney
in the Department of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity with the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the hearing, Allen and
Brown were told by the Housing Authority's executive director that Allen
could gain approval of his Section 8 assistance application if he
provided fingerprints that proved he was not "Larry Hamilton."

The fingerprints cleared Allen and he was allowed to apply a Section 8
credit to an Oak Park apartment. Shortly after the approval, though,
Allen filed suit against the Housing Authority--this time tacking on
another charge that he was improperly denied the housing assistance.

According to Allen, a white man and a white woman who applied for
Section 8 assistance also received background checks that pointed to
criminal behavior, but Allen charged that their cases were handled in a
different and more preferential manner. The two whites both also were
fingerprinted to clear their names, and the district court that
initially tried Allen's case dismissed it largely on that similarity.

But the Appellate Court last week saw the incidents differently--with
both the white man and the white woman involved. Among other things, the
court believed that Allen, the black man, was "discouraged from
attempting to clear his name," while the two whites were treated in the
opposite manner.

"Allen was put to his proofs, and (the white man) was given a free pass.
This is disparate treatment," the Appellate Court ruled. "And, the two
men were almost identically situated: both had (Section 8 housing)
applications suspended because they were suspected of having committed
disqualifying crimes; both appealed and were given a hearing; and both
of them asserted facts about their pasts that would have allowed their
applications to be reinstated. (The white man's) was (reinstated);
Allen's was not."

Confronted with evidence that they had treated Allen and the white woman
differently in their Section 8 applications, the Housing Authority
blamed the disparate actions on "a policy change not discrimination."
The Oak Park housing officials maintained they changed the rules after
its "treatment of Allen led to problems." The Housing Authority,
however, has not produced documentation either about the policy shift or
when and why it occurred.

"None of this proves Oak Park is lying. Indeed, the (Oak Park Housing)
Authority may very well be able to convince a jury that a changed policy
best explains why it handled (the two) applications so differently, but
Allen casts sufficient doubt on the Authority's explanation," according
to the Appellate Court. "Whether Oak Park did indeed create a new policy
or whether it came up with the new policy after the fact to explain its
different treatment is a contested factual issue (that) should be
decided by a jury."

Also, said the court, the different processing for the black man and the
two whites "could very well be a case of bureaucratic bungling, but were
it discrimination, it would likely look much the same."